Woo, I'm really, really white and nerdy now! I have my own Wikipedia talk page! (Probably best not to ask why I was editing a page on that most unfortunate fashion trend, the "whale tail". Suffice it to say I happened upon the page in my weird wanderings on the web and thought it could use a bit of cleaning up.)

My computer has crashed. Not sure yet what the problem is, but it won't boot. I'm hoping it's just a loose cable or similar, something simple.

I'll tell you, it couldn't have picked a MORE INCONVIENIENT time to do this!

Oh, in case you're wondering, I'm typing this on Andrew's laptop. Very slowly. This keyboard sucks.

Right, VectorMagic is cooooool. It lets you very easily turn a raster image (i.e., jpg, gif, png, etc.) into a vector (eps or svg) image. It's just COOOOL. Go see. If you're a graphic geek of any sort, you'll waste some time and bandwidth playing with it. Here's one I prepared earlier:

I laughed out loud a couple times watching this. Could be because I'm a geek. Or maybe it's because I use Gmail. Or maybe because I hate spam. Or all three!

I've been playing with Google Earth. I decided I wanted to have a look at Friar Park, the home of the late George Harrison (which is still home to his wife and, I believe, his son, although his son is about thirty now and probably also has a place of his own).

It's quite extraordinary! You can see it quite well with the satellite pictures, and the estate is really big with amazing gardens. I knew this, of course, but it was cool to see it. (You can grab the Google Earth location if you want.)

I also had a look at Abbey Road in London, and the world's most famous zebra crossing (and yes, I have a Google Earth location file for that, too).

The reason I was doing all this is because I recently read a very good book, Waiting for the Beatles: An Apple Scruff's Story by Carol Bedford (who was one of the Apple Scruffs), and I got a bit curious and started looking on the web for pictures of the areas where the Scruffs used to hang around, which sort of led me to thinking about that zebra crossing and made me think of Google Earth...

The main pages of BonniNet have gotten a pretty drastic redesign. You can see for yourself.

I need to be creative. I need to meditate, I need to eat, I need to sleep, I need to be creative. If I don't get enough of any of those things, I start to become unblanced or even unwell.

I've decided to redo the main pages for this domain. I really like the Renaissance-inspired scroll design, but I've had it for years now (honestly, I'm not sure how many, probably around five years... yikes...) and I'm kinda tired of it. So I'm working on something new, something different, something creative, and something like I've never had on the main pages of this domain. For one thing, the mew pages are black. For another, it's inspired by psychadelia (blame it on The Beatles), fantasy-grunge, and it's got a magickal, sparkly, slightly hallucinogenic feel to it.

Yeah, really.

The graphics are done. Now comes the boring, tedious part, wherein I have to do all the code and tweak and tweak until it's just right. The good part is that last time I did a redesign I did it using an external style sheet and SSI inclusions, so it should (theoretically) be super easy to change the pages by just changing the style sheet and the inclusions. How easy it will actually be remains to be seen, of course, but that's the theory.

I'm also going to do away with my "memberships" page, I think. Not that I'm not still a member of a lot of things, but I think I can work it in effectively elsewhere (like on the "About" page) and just do away with that extra bit. And besides, I couldn't work the link into the new design very elegantly, so I just did away with it. Orf wiv its 'ead, I say!

New design should be premiering soonish, like, maybe by the end of the week if things don't get hectic and I don't get too distracted with other stuff.

Well, my DVD writer is... I won't say it's hosed, because it does work. But it doesn't work properly. Can't write at full speed, and it doesn't always read CDs properly. It might be the cable or something (I've seen that happen before, certainly) or similar, but we're going to go get another one, anyway, an internal one.

Which means, of course, that I have to clean my desk. Not a happy prospect. My desk is The Repository of Everything That I Can't Find Another Place For and Things That I Just Happened to Have Nearby. Seriously, my desk... You know how they say that a clean desk is a sign of a disordered mind? If that's true, I have the most orderly mind anyone's ever seen... (which pretty much demonstrates that the saying is wrong, but, as ever, I digress).

There's been a lot going around about how the smiley emoticon (you know, this guy: :-) ) is having a 25th anniversary (or birthday, maybe). Well, according to Snopes, that's not the full story.

From the Snopes article:

Professor Fahlman may have been the first person to use a smiley online, and he may even have invented the form of emoticon meant to be read with one's head tilted to the left (to better see the representation of a face in what would otherwise look like something that came out of the typewriter when the cat ran across the keys: a colon, dash, and parenthesis that form the eyes, nose, and mouth respectively). Additional text smileys, indeed the veritable explosion of them, appear to be little more than refinements on Fahlman's three-character :-) model.
 
However, all that said, neither the basic idea nor the first use of an emoticon originated with Fahlman, as this sighting from the May 1967 issue of Reader's Digest demonstrates [...]

Way cool. And I'd LOVE to have a pen table that big! (And to be able to draw that well in Photoshop!)

Wow, now this is some cooool Photoshopping.

For many, many years, I've used Granite Canyon (not going to provide a link, it's not important, you can Google if you really care) for the secondary DNS on all my/our/client domains. Some time ago, I noticed that they were pretty mucked up, and I couldn't access any of my DNS information. I thought, at the time, that it was a temporary problem. Tonight, I found that it was still mucked up, and I couldn't make any changes, nor could I add any new domains (not that I have any new domains to add, but I was kind of thinking about registering something new, which is what made me go around and check it out).

So I had to find a new secondary DNS provider. Now, we have plenty of geeky acquaintances who could provide this service, but that's a bit of a hassle, because they have to do it on their server, rather than us doing it, so you end up being a pest if you make changes (not good). I had a look around for a while and eventually settled on another free DNS provider, who have proved to be quite easy to use and with a really good web interface.

I'll give a link in case any geeks ever read this and want to know where they can get free primary or secondary DNS. We went with EveryDNS.net.

Non-geeks, feel free to disregard this blog entry.

Yay! The server is back and not only is it back, it's actually repaired. It will now boot itself automatically (a *nix server is supposed to do that, after all), and doesn't require babysitting when there's a power flicker or something that interferes with the power supply (such as tripping on a power cord, which has been known to happen). I'm very pleased, to say the least. Most of the problems we've had have been because the RAID wasn't functioning and now, happily, it is! So, just, YAY!

I actually forgot this year, just so distracted with a ton of other stuff that's gobbling up my attention, but on the 6th it was the 7th anniversary of when I started blogging here. I don't think there are very many other bloggers who can say the same (though I do know a few, of course). When I started blogging I was doing it manually, ugh! Then I used Blogger, and stopped because it kept going down and such (it's much better now, by the way, very good system), and then I used Greymatter (poor archival system, yikes!) and then Movable Type, which I'm still using. So, there you go. Seven years of wasting bandwidth. Woohoo.

As a monopoly, and as individuals, we value integrity, honesty, openness, personal excellence, constructive self-criticism, continual self-improvement, and mutual respect. We are committed to our customers and partners and have a passion for technology.
 
We take on big challenges such as anti-trust lawsuits, and pride ourselves on seeing them through successfully. We hold ourselves accountable to all our customers, shareholders, partners, and employees by honoring our commitments, providing results, and striving for the highest quality.

(Don't worry, the site's a joke, and Firefox is Open Source, so even if Microsoft did adopt it for their own "next generation" browser, the non-Microsoft Firefox would still be around. Be sure to read all the Features and such, it's pretty damned funny!)

Committed to bandwidth on Wed, 23 May 07
in Links and Commentary Thereon

 

Well, the new server has been built. It has to be set up and configured, but it's built. We haven't scheduled a time to go and install it yet, but it'll probably take an entire afternoon. So, yay! No more crappy stupid downtime every time the dang power flickers! At least, once we get the new server live and on site...

Okay. The spammer has gone to a distributed attack. From the looks of the IP addresses involved, he/they have a bunch of zombie machines, that is, computers infected with trojans that run the script.

This pisses me off because there are apparently so many COMPLETE MORONS out there who manage to get this crap on their computer to begin with. Hello, ever hear of, oh, I don't know, VIRUS PROTECTION? How about maybe not clicking on everything any random person sends you, think that could help?!

Okay, that vent over, now to the f#%king bastard who keeps doing this: YOU'RE AN IDIOT, MATE! Crashing my server with your poorly written bot will NOT cause your website to have better rankings in the search engines!!!

For now, we've disabled comments, because we've completely removed mt-comments.cgi and we're setting up various means of preventing the spam attacks. They're hitting the script from the outside, that is, they're totally by-passing any pages or blogs, and just going directly. Now that there IS NO SCRIPT there, they can't call it.

We're also doing several other things, including rebuilding the kernal so that traffic has a better connection throttle and we'll be looking at upgrading Movable Type (I haven't done it in too long, I admit it) and a few other tricks we've found.

This kind of comment spamming is, apparently, all too common. On a really big server, it just slows it down. On a small server like ours, it kills it completely.

So, well, no comments for an indefinite period. If you want to talk to me, feel free to email, though.

Okay. Yes, our server's been off and on for a few days. It's the same problem as we had before, probably the same idiot comment spammer, running a script that effectively creates a SYN flood, which is a kind of Denial of Service Attack.

This time we've recompiled the kernal and added a few things to throttle traffic and shut down inappropriate multiple responses, plus we've set the firewall up with an extensive block of IPs (I mean a really BIG block, too). The IP block will keep him out for a while, but as this happened a month ago, I'd reckon it won't be long before he's back on yet another ISP and we'll have to block that, as well (we may end up blocking most of Russia, and for that I do apologise, but I doubt there's a great deal on our servers of particular interest to most Russians, anyway, so I don't think they're missing much).

You can see some more of this idiot's work in this guestbook, which has been autospammed just about to death. Fortunately for them, it didn't kill their server (it kills ours for a couple of technical hypergeeky reasons I won't go into).

So that's the deal. Wish us luck that with the new throttling and IP blocks and other precautions, we'll be able to keep this f#$%ing b@st@rd away from our server. I can tell you I'm sending the worst vibes I can manage!

Whoops. I broke it. I was mucking around with Atom and, oh, long story short, I broke it. RSS is fixed now, though, as far as I can tell.

Mucked up my blog for a few days (betcha didn't even notice ;)). I actually had the Atom feed being generated as the main page. Whoops! Fixed now, though. :)

The message Andrew sent to users on the server:

G'day caffeine-users.

As you may be aware, our favourite server has been on and off for a couple
of days.

What you may not be aware of is it's thanks to a spammer trying to spam
the comments on one of our blogs. They launched so many scripts that it
repeatedly ate up RAM until the operating system could no longer function,
causing a crash.

We're not sure which blog it was they were trying, but whatever it was,
we know that they didn't actually succeed in adding any comments. Even
so, if you maintain a Movable Type blog, and you have comment moderation
turned on, now may be a good time to check pending comments. If you find
a bunch of stuff in Russian, please let me know.

We have taken steps to ensure that this particular attack vector will not
occur again. And, of course, lindor's replacement is in the process of
being built. It's a more powerful machine, which will degrade more
gracefully if someone tries to hammer it.

Apologies for the downtime, and thanks for your patience.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage

---

I have long said that spammers are the absolute scum of the earth, haven't I? Well, this is the sort of crap these pathetic losers do!

Well, Andrew managed to fix the broken server, as far as I can tell. That's a relief. So the Alicorna site is restored. I'm still not sure what I want to do with it, though. I mean, it was an actual business site, and since I'm not really doing that business any more (just got burned out; I still occasionally will do web design for selected people), it seems a bit... odd.

I'll have a think about it and work out what I want to do and how I want to do it. Maybe I'll just leave it alone...

Odd thing I found is that the Alicorna site actually has lower Google PageRank than the Uncommon Touch site. The reason that's odd is because I strongly suspect that the Alicorna site is far better interlinked and it's been on the net since 1998; the Uncommon Touch site has only been online less than a year. (Yes, I'm currently learning Search Engine Optimsation basics; otherwise I never would have noticed).

Well. The server is sort of fixed. I mean, the thing that was broken is fixed, but now I've found some other stuff that's broken. I got some error messages that MAY give Andrew a clue as to how to fix it, but at the moment I'm kinda past caring...

The site that's giving me the headache (at the moment, anyway) is the Alicorna site. Now, I haven't done any web development on a serious basis for some time. I still have a lot of good links and a few downloads and freebies, and some helpful stuff there, but honestly, the site is mostly maintained because... well, just because. It's not like I make any money on or from that site...

Right at the moment I'm so annoyed and ticked off that I'm considering just shutting the site down and redirecting the URL to something else.

Whether I will actually do this, I don't know. I won't do it in the middle of the night in a pissed off state of frustration, certainly (which is precisely the state I'm currently in), but I'm just so damned annoyed.

The big problem, you see, is that about a year ago Andrew put the entire web structure into a chroot jail. For the non-geeky, that means that even if someone manages to get into our server via some random web page, they will NOT be able to get into the rest of the server and actually do much. Worst they could do is trash the web partition or run various scripts that would bootstrap them elsewhere. They can't touch DNS or sendmail or any of the really useful things that the kind of slime who break into your server really want access to.

But because of this little "capsule", a lot of stuff doesn't run properly, or it only runs if you muck it around quite a lot or... bah. It's all a big stupid tiresome mess and I just feel like deleting the lot of it. It's not like there aren't plenty of web design type sites out there, y'know? The world won't miss my paltry offering of a few web templates, a bunch of links, and a handful of freebies.

Maybe I should turn it into one of those "mostly advertising" sites with loads of affiliate links and such.... *sigh* Unfortunately, I have a bit of integrity... While I don't have a problem with some monetization of websites, I just can't do that, especially to a domain I've had and loved for so long....

Oh, well. I'll think about it tomorrow.

Andrew broke all the websites I have (and a couple other peoples') that use MySQL. I don't know how he did it. Neither does he. He broke them and then mucked around for a couple hours trying to figure it out, whinging the whole time. He finally went to bed, which is good, because I got pretty sick of listening to him complain.

So if by some change you go to one of my many sites that uses MySQL and it's not there, well, this is why. Andrew broke them.

Well, my monitor, a quite expensive Sony Trinitron, lost about half of the green gun. That is, everything was decidedly pinky-purple, because there wasn't enough green in the mix. It's been wonky for a while, in minor ways. Most recently, it was getting really fuzzy in places, so it was quite hard to read text in many cases. In any event, no matter how expensive it was, it wasn't economical to have it fixed, because you can get a new monitor for far less than the cost of repairing the old one.

So that's what we did. I now have a widescreen LCD monitor, and it's pretty amazing. I can actually read the text! Since this is much smaller than the older one, I can also move the monitor farther away from my face, which aids in reading (I have special computer glasses, you see, for mid-range viewing, and the old monitor was so close it was sometimes too close to focus properly). But the display on this new one is really crisp, amazing definition.

It's not so long ago that I got a new computer system (but not a new monitor) because the old one was just getting ready to give up the ghost in various ways, and now I've got a new monitor because the old one DID give up the ghost all of a sudden.

So there you go. New computer, new monitor, crisp display that I can actually read, perhaps I'll have fewer headaches now. (I can hope, anyway.)

I've put an RSS feed on my rant site. And a couple of new entries in the past few weeks, so if you're into reading my rants, go have a look.

(Yeah, I have that song from Little Shop of Horrors in my head now...)

Anyway, uhm, because I'm a geek, I've got this ever-growing list of news feeds. And for some weird reason I thought that maybe one other human being in the world might, for some strange reason, be vaguely interested in seeing the OPML of all the feeds to which I'm subscribed. I had a look and it's actually pretty diverse. Lots of stuff about online marketing and such, at least one digital art related thing, lots of funny stuff, quotes of the day (well, c'mon, where'd you think I was getting them?! LOL!), a bunch of news ones, loads of geeky stuff, copyright and IP law stuff, some autism blogs, a weather feed, the feed from the discussion board at a really cool perfume lovers' site, just all sorts of stuff, really. Most of it geeky, but not all of it. Some of the stuff might even be interesting to people other than me, so, well, take a look if you want.

Bonni's OPML (as of 2:12pm AEST Thursday, 19 October 2006; subject to change at random intervals)

Well, I'm well into installing a new shopping cart system for the Uncommon Touch site. As I'm mostly unfamiliar with the shopping cart, it's fairly slow going, to say the least. However, it's an Open Source shopping cart system (after being greatly tempted to go with X-Cart, which I can get for dealer prices because I know the right people, I did decide to go with Zencart, instead, for various reasons I won't bother to outline here), so there are plenty of free add-ons for it (and some that I'm going to have to pay for, but I can live with that).

It's a bit of a steep learning curve. Well, not steep, only moderate, but there's a lot to learn, so it's uphill for a long way, if that makes sense. I mean, I've got the thing installed, and I've got the basic idea down okay, but it's fiddly to do all the customisations (and to figure out how to do them!) and add-ons and so forth. So I'm just going along at it, learning as I go, and reading my various news feeds in between. It's a good, geeky life. I'm enjoying it, believe it or not.

One of the things I hate about webdev is that stuff changes C O N S T A N T L Y. You have to keep up with this stuff 24/7. Security alerts, updates to server stuff, changes in standards, it's just a never ending grind.

At the moment I'm installing a particular shopping cart on another site, and I'm finding that our server isn't configured in such a way as to use it properly. Which means, in this case, that I have to get Andrew to download the updates and re-compile PHP. Which means I could be waiting for days... or weeks.... or YEARS....

San Diego's Qualcomm has announced that the next version of its Eudora email client is going to be released as a free, open source application built upon the same code as Mozilla Thunderbird. Programmers from both Qualcomm and the Mozilla Foundation will work together to develop future versions of the client.

Me, I used Eudora for many, many years. I stopped using it some time last year, when the latest update required me to pay yet again (or be bombarded with advertising). I was a bit sad about that, because I like Eudora and I know it extremely well. But, well, I thought I'd give Thunderbird a try, after all, it's free, right?

I do like Thunderbird, and it's what I use now, but.... Now Eudora is going to be free, too! And under development by the Mozilla team! Woot! Soon, I'll be able to have my Eudora back. Oh, lovely Eudora.... all free, no ads....

By the way, this is going to show both my age and my extreme nerdiness (I'm nerdy in the extreme, whiter than sour cream, look at me, I'm white and nerdy; sorry, just had a Weird Al moment). Eudora was originally developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), along with a whole LOT of other internet software protocols, including the engine that's still at the heart of Internet Explorer (check it out sometime; go to Help: About Internet Explorer and read the copyright notice there).

ANYway, Eudora was originally developed at NCSA and it got its name from Pulitizer Prize winning author Eudora Welty, because of her short story entitled "Why I Live at the P.O."

Now, as it turns out, this fact is on Wikipedia, but I knew it already because not only did I live in Urbana, Illinois for a long time, particularly during the period when a lot of these internet protocols were being developed, I've used Eudora for a long time, and I happen to know of Eudora Welty because, well, I'm edjumacated.

And very, very geeky. And a nerd sometimes, too.

Okay, so in this post I managed to quote Weird Al, mention a Pulitizer Prize winning author, talk about NCSA and UIUC (I didn't mention the Silicon Prairie, though, oh, okay, I just did, whew), link to Wikipedia, reference one of my own previous posts (about being white and nerdy), mention something Open Source, demonstrate just how long I've been on the net, and share an obscure factoid that, it turns out, isn't as obscure as all that. All I need to do now is mention that PINE (the Unix email management program) stands for Pine Is Not Elm and I'll hit Geek Net Trivia Bingo.

BINGO!

It seems that even the once-mighty CNET is having a hard time of it these days. Too much competition, internal difficulties, management problems...

Which reminds me to note that anyone who thinks that a really huge website/company can't go downhill in a hurry and lose their traffic and business really needs a good course in The History of the World Wide Web. The web is one place where little shepherds rise up to take on giants with surprising regularity. In the case of CNET, it's more like many smaller (and better?) sites taking traffic all different directions (which is more like Whack-a-Mole than David and Goliath, but still).

So, the thing is, I can't find the cable to connect the camera to the computer. In fact, I can't find two cables that connect two cameras to the computer (I kept my older Kodak Digital when I got the new one; it's a good little camera, despite being older).

Today, Andrew got me a USB card reader. This will enable me to read both different kinds of cards for both cameras easily. The Kodak Share Software doesn't auto detect the card, now, but that's okay, because Picassa does (and I like it better than the Kodak stuff, anyway).

I'm hoping that the older camera will have a slightly less quirky automatic whitepoint thingy, as I have a lot of trouble with that with my newer camera when doing product photography. The new camera is good, and I do like it, but the white point drives me NUTS when doing fiddly photographs of jewellery....

Anyway, that's my latest geeky shiny thing. Now that I read this over, it's not all that shiny, is it... ?

I just wanted to recommend Google Reader. I've been playing around with RSS readers for a while now, and I was going to go with Bloglines, but recent improvements to Google Reader have made it my reader of choice.

It's free. It works really well. It's pretty intuitive. You can share items (haven't done that yet, but I'll work it out), you can export or import an OPML file. You can add Google Reader to your Google personalised homepage. It's got other good features, as well.

Just thought I'd mention it, in case anyone's after a very nice, easy, free RSS feed reader.

I'm totally hooked on Google Mail, now I'm hooked on Google Reader, and I've been hooked on Google search for ages... Google is my world. That should scare me.

Just got spam through one of the mailforms I hadn't fixed yet (on a different domain). Fixed it immediately. And you know what? Every time I put a CAPTCHA on a mailform, I just feel like raising up my middle finger to the sky and shouting "F**K YOU, YOU SPAMMING BASTARDS!"

Only without the asterisks.

Thank goodness. I'm back. Whew. Server was offline for several hours due to a power outage at the hosting location. Back now, though. Whew.

However, this has prompted me to see about setting up a blog of some sort elsewhere, just to have a place where I can post things like, "Hey, the server's down, and by the way, I can't get mail sent to any of my domains, but you can still mail me at the spamcop address."

I'm thinking I might just put it on Blogspot. Blogger has had some amazing improvement in the years since I last used it (that'd be more than five years, so I'm not suprised to see big improvements, of course).

When I get it set up, I'll put a big link here so people who care about this sort of thing (like, where my server has gone) can go have a look if they want (I think that would be maybe three people, which, out of 66.5billion people or so on the planet, isn't exactly earth shattering, eh?).

Anyway. I'm back. Wheeewwww. That was scary. *shudder* I hate when that happens (thankfully, it happens rarely).

So, last night I dreamed about RSS feeds. Seriously. This happens when I'm trying to learn something new, I dream about it. I used to dream in HTML, in commands for a particular interactive chat program I used to spend a lot of time in, I used to dream in CSS, I seem to recall dreaming in SSI at least once...

So, why did I wait so long to learn about RSS and how incredibly useful it is, hmmm? I always do this. I put off learning CSS for ages and when I finally started to learn it I was astounded by how good it is, and how much better it makes, well, everything. And then I learned about SSI and the combination of SSI and CSS make it so I can change an entire site design in a matter of moments, provided I set it up properly to begin with. And now, because I didn't have enough TLAs (three letter acronyms) in my life already, I'm doing the RSS thing.

HTML, of course, is an ETLA (extended three letter acronym), as is HTTP. URL and URI, of course, are standard TLAs.

WTF? I think I'd better GTB (go to bed). I'm suffering from acronym overdose...

Well, I did some redesigning on the Uncommon Touch site. I'm actually quite pleased with the way it turned out. I'm using a couple of third-party tools to accomplish things, which actually beats doing it all myself. There are now two different RSS feeds there, one for items that are listed, the other for news and notes. I just thought it was a better way to organize things.

Anyway, go have a look if you're interested in webdev and geeky stuff.

Happy to report that putting in CAPTCHAs on my mailforms seems to have stopped the flow of automated spam through them. HOORAY!

In case you're interested, the third-party service I'm currently using is ProtectWebForm.com.

Eventually, we'll install the PERL module that generates CAPTCHAs locally, but this is a great solution for the time being, and a really great service.

Yay! I think I've worked out how to improve the quality of the .jpgs that my webcam turns out. I had it on 100% quality already, but was still seeing a lot of icky compression damage (yuck). Finally fiddled with the settings and have taken off the progressive encoding (which normally shouldn't negatively affect the image that much, but...). The images are much better now.

No, there's no point in me posting this.

Well, okay. At the time of this writing, there's no background image (you know, the orange bits on the sides and the unicorn-woman figure who looks strangely familiar). I updated the image a bit, and now, for some weird reason, I can't upload the graphic. My FTP program just poops out... I've tried a few things and can't figure out what the problem is, and it's late, and I'm tired, so I'm going to bed. I'll fix it tomorrow. Until then, you can cope with the lack of a background image, I think.

[EDIT] Fixed now. No idea what the problem was, but I got the upload to work and it's there now.

Because spammers are complete bastards who can't just keep their filth to themselves, I'm slowly adding CAPTCHAs to my mailforms. Right now, the main form for this domain and the one for this blog now have them. They're not, I'm sorry to say, accessible to the visually impaired, but I may be able to work around that at some point (the third-party CAPTCHA service I'm using does have them, but I can't work out how to put them in; I'll get Andrew to muck with it and see if he can figure it out).

So, anyway, if you don't have my email address, you'll have to do the CAPTCHA to mail me through the mailforms. Sorry about that, but, you know, spammers are complete scum. (If you don't have my email address and want it, I'm happy to tell people what it is, it's not actually a secret: bonni at spamcop dot net and you need to obviously format that into a proper email address, and yes, it is super highly filtered for spam, heh).

Well, I've got a new and improved RSS feed set up now. It's a lot easier to subscribe to it now, IMHO. I'm using a third party service to manage it along with some of my other RSS feeds, so there you go. If you're subscribed to the old one, you can still do that (it should still get rebuilt automatically), but you might want to have a look at the new one, anyway.

Buddy and Bill were a couple of drinking buddies who worked as aircraft mechanics in Pittsburgh.

One day the airport was fogged in and they were stuck in the hangar with nothing to do.

Buddy said, "Man, I wish we had something to drink!"

Bill says, "Me too. Y'know, I've heard you can drink jet fuel and get a buzz. You wanna try it?"

So they pour themselves a couple of glasses of high octane hooch and got completely smashed.

The next morning Buddy wakes up and is surprised at how good he feels. In fact he feels GREAT! NO hangover! NO bad side effects. Nothing! He was amazed!

As he's pondering this great discovery he and his friend have made, the phone rings. It's Bill.

Bill says, "Hey, how do you feel this morning?"

Buddy says, "I feel great. How about you?"

Bill says, "I feel great, too. You don't have a hangover?"

Buddy says, "No, that jet fuel is great stuff -- no hangover, nothing. We ought to do this more often!"

"Yeah, well there's just one thing."

"What's that?"

"Have you farted yet?"

"No..."

Continue reading "A rather crude but somewhat amusing joke...."…

My new computer, as I've mentioned, is in a black case. I have therefore named it Schwartz. Partly, this is the German word for "black", but I like the reference to the Mel Brooks Star Wars parody, Spaceballs. It's not my favorite movie or anything, but "may the schwartz be with you" and "use the schwartz" struck me as funny in a geeky, obscure sort of way.

So now my computer is officially Schwartz.

The previous computer didn't actually have a name, as it was Andrew's prior to being mine. The one before that, the one I built, was known as Baby.

Just in case anyone was curious. Which I'm quite sure you weren't.

The Naming of Hosts is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a host must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

First of all, there's the name that the users use daily,
Such as venus, athena, and cisco, and ames,
Such as titan or sirius, hobbes or europa--
All of them sensible everyday names.

There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the web pages, some for the flames:
Such as mercury, phoenix, orion, and charon--
But all of them sensible everyday names.

But I tell you, a host needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can it keep its home page perpendicular,
And spread out its data, send pages world wide?

(From RFC 2100, and yes, I know what an RFC is, and yes, I am a geek. And the Schwartz is with me.

Because ICQ sucks, I have had to get a new ICQ number. I couldn't remember the password and when I went to retrieve it, ICQ insisted that my email address wasn't registered, which I know perfectly well it was. Color me unimpressed with their "system".

The only reason I have ICQ, really, is to send SMS messages to Andrew's phone relatively easy (it's easier than logging in to the Vodafone site and definitely easier than punching buttons on the phone!). I don't even use the ICQ client (I use Trillian Pro). When I actually want to chat, I use GoogleTalk.

But anyway, if you had my ICQ number before and you want the new one, just let me know and I'll be happy to share it. Not that very many people talk to me that way, but, well, you never know. I thought I'd offer.

I've got my new computer, and the changeover was almost painless. I took the opportunity to clean my desk and move some stuff around. The new case is black. Previous one was that icky beige colour. This case is much smaller (thankfully) and the whole thing is quieter. All my drives are in, no worries, read perfectly. WindowsXP is activated and updated.

I haven't really put it through its paces yet, but it's got a much faster processer (almost 4 times as fast) and WAY more memory (2Gb! Woot!), so I'm expecting much better overall performance. I also expect to be able to multi-task and context-switch much more efficiently and without the hard drive contantly grinding as Windows writes to the drive for scratch space.

Now I just have the very, very tedious job of reinstalling all my software. Ugh. I do have all my anti-spyware and anti-virus and security stuff installed, as well as basic utilities (WinZip, WinRar, Firefox, etc.).

So. Ze computer, eet eez good. And it should last me a long time. The last one lasted five years or so, so we'll see how long I can stretch this one out to...

I've ordered a new webcam. My little cheapy one is dead. Not that it took especially good pictures, mind you, and it was pretty cheap, so it's not a great loss or anything, but I found that I actually kind of miss the thing. Weird. I went for years without a webcam, only bought one because someone I wanted to talk to via video chat asked me about it, and now I find I've gotten to actually like having a webcam.

Go figure.

Right. So I got up today early to get Zoë ready for school (normally, Andrew does that, but he had to go to Canberra on business today and left super early). I generally leave my computer on at night, so that I can leave stuff open and so on. I do disconnect from the net, of course.

Anyway, I came out to get Zoë up and had a bit of time to spare (amazingly!) and sat at the computer while she ate her breakfast. Guess what? The computer, she is broke.

Continue reading "Ze computer, she eez broke"…

Okay, so I got with the mid-noughties program and set up an RSS feed for this blog. NOT that I expect hoards of people subscribing or anything, but I set up an RSS for the Uncommon Touch site (which, by the way, I finished finally, so the archives and such all match now), and I thought to myself, "Self, that wasn't too hard," and further thought, "Maybe I'll add an RSS to my personal blog," which actually proved to be more difficult for various reasons, mostly resting in my own incompetence.

Whew. That was one hell of a compound sentence, eh?

Anyway. There's now an RSS feed for this blog, so if you're into that, go ahead and subscribe. Link is on the sidebar on the index page, toward the top, but in case you can't be bothered to look for it there, here's the link to the RSS again.

Well, I've mostly got the Uncommon Touch site set up. I need to tweak a few more things, and I haven't got all the templates for the weblog portion of it set up yet, but so long as you don't want to look at any archives or get a direct link to the complete Oztion listings (can't think WHY I didn't include that link, d'oh!), it's mostly there.

Took me long enough, don't you think? What is it, about a month... *sigh* I am so slack sometimes.

It seems I didn't mention it in this blog, but I've started offering customized eBay templates, logos, etc. for sale on, where else, eBay. I'm actually listing via the U.S. site for various reasons (better exposure, mostly). Anyway, if you'd like to have a look at what I've got so far, visit the template/logo section of my eBay store.

Very keen observers with very long memories might recognize a few of the templates as being recycled licenseware graphics from my Alicorna site, but you'd have to have, as I said, a very long memory and a damned good mental inventory of my previous work. Heck, some of the stuff I wandered through on my hard drive even I didn't remember...

My little "intro" page (which I use as an intro on various sites of which I'm a member) has been updated. The design now matches the design on this blog, and I've freshened the information a bit. You can have a look if you want.

Well, I've uploaded some new freebies to my Alicorna site. I didn't write/create any of them, but I have full redistribution rights, of course. None will work on a Mac, unfortunately, and for that I do apologize (just wanted to save Mac users a bit of time).

The first is a Basic HTML Tutorial in ebook format. It's very clear and easy to follow. I was considering writing one, myself, but why reinvent the wheel? Free to use, and free distribution, but may not be sold.

The second is a little program to quickly and easily generate a quicky photo gallery page. Very cool. Not very well documented, but not very hard to figure out.

The third is another program, this one to quickly and easily generate drop-down menus. I haven't tested for cross-platform compatiblity of the code, but I had the program around and thought, "Hey, someone might find some use for this," and there it is.

Well, I decided to start a blog dedicated to my ramblings on the subject of fragrances. This is partly because I suspect I've been boring the regular readers of this blog (all two of you), and partly to draw traffic and interest to my commercial site.

The design is unusual for me. For one thing, it's quite pink, only it's a deep rose type pink. And it's black lace. Very Art Deco Paris Boudoir (although not, I hope, "like a French whorehouse", which is what you smell like when you wear too much perfume, according to my late, beloved grandmother).

Well, I guess I'll give the link now, eh? The Perfume Blog. Oh, or, I guess you could just follow the link in the sidebar there, too, under "Other Blogs by Me".

I just got a book cover accepted on the FIRST submission! Normally I get one or more revision requests (anything from very minor to repainting large bits of it), but this time, for this book, I got it the first time I sent a final. WOOT!

I don't mind doing revisions, for what it's worth, and if they ask for enough of them, I get revision pay, but I've always wanted to do a cover and get it in one. Heh.

We went out yesterday to the city to Andrew's office Christmas party. I walked rather more than usual, and my feet and ankles are killing me today, but I got some really good photographs while we were out, and I put them in the Picture Gallery.

Well, I decided to redo our wedding pages. I had various reasons for that, but mostly, I couldn't stand looking at the 1999 design any more. Andrew argued against changing it, said it was a sort of "time capsule" but, no, sorry, my design skills and so forth have improved greatly, and I see the site as a frame for the information, and I'm sick of that frame (literally; the original site had a decorative frameset, of all things!).

I also,naturally, took the opportunity to completely clean up the HTML, which is, in fact, now XHTML, and completely validated, as is the CSS, and I updated all the links that were peppered throughout the site and updated some of the information just a bit here and there.

So, well, if you never saw the old site, you're out of luck, because it's no longer there, but you can still read all about our wedding and stuff, and do it on valid XHTML/CSS pages with a much improved (at least, I think it's improved) design.

I've put some new pictures in my picture gallery. Go have a look if you like (details are there).

Okay. I've been working on this blog and its many templates off and on all day and I've gotten all of the templates of this site to validate perfectly. There's NOTHING wrong with the HTML or the CSS.

And yet, the individual entry pages (specifically around the comments) still don't display some things correctly in Internet Explorer. And you know what? I don't care. If I can write 100% valid code and the stinking browser still doesn't display correctly, well, that's just too damned bad. I can't be expected to figure out what the bug is that's causing the problem, and I'm not going to try.

If you're using IE and some of the display looks funny to you, well, hey, blame Bill Gates and then switch to something better.

Well, I've been poring over the code on the individual entry pages for hours. I cannot for the life of me figure out why certain aspects of the page design work perfectly in Netscape, Opera, and Firefox, but do NOT work in IE. It's GOT to be some quirk of the browser that I'm not aware of, some bug that affects the display. I'm genuinely perplexed, and very annoyed.

I'll keep messing with it because I tend to be obsessive that way, but I actually have other things that I need to get done, as well, and if IE can't read and execute perfectly valid CSS, well, I dunno what I can do...

Anyway. If youre using IE and the display looks weird to you, I do apologize, and I'm still looking into it, but at this point, I'm still scratching my head (mostly in the places where I've pulled out my hair).

After what feels like hours of tweaking (oh, wait, it was hours), I think I've got the new template sorted out, and the comments appear to work. I decided to just require a TypeKey authentication (easy, free, private, no problem) for commenting to save myself having to manually moderate the commenting system. Of course, people are still welcome to email me if they prefer.

I haven't yet checked the site with IE, although I did with Opera and it's fine. IE is my most hated browser (a position formally occupied by NS4.x, which I no longer give a damn about, and yeah, this site probably looks like complete crap in that one). I also haven't got a Mac, so I can't check with any flavor of Mac browser, but the HTML/CSS is pretty standard so I don't anticipate too many issues in that department.

Whew. And people wonder why I tend to keep the same site design for years at a time...

Well, that was more painful than I expected, but I got the new template installed. It was painful because I ended up doing a zillion and one rebuilds and MySQL crashed in the middle of it for some unknown reason and I had to figure out how to restart it by myself (which I did, I'm happy to say). Had a few tweaks I had to get sorted out, as well. I think I may still need to install the custom templates for some of the system pages, but I'm tired and it's late and I can't be bothered to check on it right now (I'll do it tomorrow.)

Comments are off at the moment because I can't seem to get the &^$#ing auth stuff to work (it works perfectly in the test blog, but not in this one, no idea why, too tired to deal with it).

Oh, and orange is not among my favorite colors. I can't remember ever doing a web design that was primarily orange. I wear orange a lot because it's good for my coloring, but I don't actually like it that much (if that makes sense), and so I put the anthropomorphic unicorn in an orange tshirt and black jeans (very, very me), and also because the orange shirt goes with the red hair in the toon, and then I just kinda had to carry the orange theme on throughout the design. I like it, and it's certainly fresh and different from the previous design, so it's all right.

Yeah, it's meant to be a sort of charicature of me, in case you were wondering. A sort of fantasy alter ego, so to speak (I'm not that cute).

Whew. Tired geek. Bedtime. Past bedtime. See you tomorrow.

Picture a fat, pale, redheaded, bespectacled geek woman doing the Snoopy Dance. That's how I feel at the moment. YAY!

I upgraded to MovableType 3.2 and it's been driving me nuts with a couple of really weird errors. I was actually so frustrated I was considering switching to something else. I had searched the knowlege base and just couldn't figure out what was wrong or how the heck to fix it, but I finally managed to hit on the right search terms and found out a way to fix the problem. YAY! *does the Snoopy Dance*

So, as soon as I can get the new template appropriately tweaked, I'll be able to change it all over. Whew. This has been driving me (more) crazy (than I normally am).

And guess what? I'm actually going to enable comments, I think (although with appropriate moderation and authorization key and stuff; I've never been keen on letting random strangers use my web space to further their own agenda, which is why I never enabled comments here).

Okay. Back to tweaking templates...

I'm actively working on a new template for this blog. I may keep the existing one as an option if I can figure out how to do that, but I've never really taken much interest in "skinning" sites, so I may just retire this design. ANYway, the new design is in Photoshop even as we speak. Zoë liked it, watched me working on it and said, "Oh, that's so cute!" and Miranda commented "That's you, Mama!" so there you go. (Enough hints for now.)

I will say that it's being designed for a 1024 screen display width. I have traditionally always made my pages so they work at 800 width, and for some things I still will, but this is a personal site, and the design I'm using actually will work at 800 (you'll have to scroll, but then you can just scroll down and be able to read all of the content once your browser is "centered"), and I'm tired of restricting myself to a teeny little space. Hey, my screen resolution is set to 1200x1600, and I know I'm not alone in that, so I figure that so long as it works at 800 for the actual text, well, if you can't see all of it in one go, that's no great loss to you. The content (I hope!) is the important stuff here.

So, anyway, keep an eye on this blog for big design changes in the forseeable but as yet non-specific future.

Well, go look in the Picture Gallery if you're interested.

Go visit my Gallery to see the new pictures I've put up and maybe download one of the new desktop wallpapers if you're interested.

I got myself a set of proper earphones (no nasty buzz!) with an attached microphone so that I can do the web chat thing. Kewl, eh?

Oh, how I wish we'd had these sets when I was a support tech! I used to get the worst crik in the neck from wedging the phone between my jaw and shoulder!

And, best of all, I can sing along with The Bangles (or whatever; I happen to be listening to The Bangles just at the moment) and still be on key because I can hear myself! Anyone who has ever lived with me can testify that while I can sing quite well, I can't sing well while wearing headphones....

I've updated my desktop wallpapers and reorganized them a bit. They now have their own gallery section for ease of viewing and downloading. Visit the Picture Gallery to have a look.

Well, I did finally find a really good deal on a wide-angle lens for my new camera. Apparently, it also does macro, which will be fun, particularly if I use my macro magnifying lenses with it, heh. I had to order a step down adapter ring for it, since the front threads are bigger than the filters that fit on the camera without the lens (i.e., normally it uses a 55mm filter, but the wide-angle is 55mm and 58mm at the front; the adapter ring is 55mm on one end and 55mm on the other, so I can put the same filters on).

I'm still learning new techniques with it, figuring out about the zoom (too much zoom, I find, tends to create that icky phenomenon known as "purple fringe", although only in certain situations), about how to use the macro filters, etc.

Anyway, we're going on a trip away for a couple of days later in the month and I expect to be taking a lot of pictures, including landscapes, which might be a situation where a wide-angle lens will come in very, very handy.

Now, I think I might go and format the macro shot I took the other day. I was quite pleased with it...

Okay, I was inspired by a little challege in a graphic and design group to which I belong, and I got out one of my many cemetery photos, filtered and tortured and tweaked it, and made it into wallpaper, and it's now available on the free wallpaper page that is part of my picture gallery. It's the bottom one, Dark Cemetery. Have a haunted Hallowed Evening, (although it's spring here, so it's just not the same).

Oh, come on, you knew it was coming. I've got a new camera, naturally I had to go take some pictures....

As it happens, we had occasion to go into the city today, so that's what I took pictures of. Look in the Melbourne section of the gallery (look on the last couple of pages; new photos get added to the end).

There are a bunch of new photos of Zoë and Miranda in their gallery. C'mon, you didn't think I'd have a new camera and no new pictures of my kids, didja? (Oh, and yes, Zoë currently has very short hair; she decided to give herself a haircut a few weeks back and the only thing for it was to cut the rest to match, unfortunately, but, hey, hair grows back...)

I need a polarizing filter (circular, so it doesn't interfere with the focus finder thingy), some macro filters (anyone who has seen my gallery surely knows how much I love to take close pictures of flowers), maybe a slave flash (sounds kinky, doesn't it, but it's actually just an additional flash that you add on and which is "slaved" to the primary flash and goes off at the same time), a decent tripod, and, oh, maybe, when I've got lots of spare money around (like that's ever likely to happen, but I can dream) a wide-angle lens and maybe an additional telephoto lens....

I think I'll start with the polarizer. They're pretty inexpensive and we're going on a holiday soon, and I'll be taking lots of landscape type pictures, so it'd come in handy...

I've got a new camera. It's my usual sort of higher end consumer type camera (as opposed to a genuinely professional level camera), and I did extensive research before choosing this one. It's a Kodak, which I'm partial to, although I did research other cameras in the same general price range and with similar capabilities.

It's a Kodak Z740, and it's got some amazing zoom capabilities. Haven't tried the macros or other nifty extras yet, but so far I'm quite impressed with it. And despite the fact that it can some with a dock, it doesn't HAVE to (I've got enough space taken up on my desk already, thanks) and it can use a nifty variety of different power sources, different kinds of batteries, etc. (which was, for me, one of the selling points).

It's last year's model, but since when do I buy cutting edge technology, anyway? I much prefer getting something that's a bit older and which has a lot of reviews and a good "track record" behind it, and which, because it's not cutting edge, is priced reasonably (and I got a very nice deal on this camera and the extra memory card I got for it, heh, eBay is good).

Now I'm off to explore the Kodak site to see about getting some tips and other information on using this nifty little camera (and it is quite small, MUCH lighter than my Kodak DC3400). If I can think of anything to take pictures of (other than my kids), I may post a few, but that remains to be seen. There's not much in the way of flowers out at the moment, and other than flowers or grass or the kids, there's not a great deal to take photos of around the place we live, other than other people's houses...

It’s a sad day and a good day. For years I’ve held onto my IE install out of love. I worked on IE 1.0 thru 5.0, and was one of the people that designed much of its UI. But my love for the past has faded. Last week I switched to Firefox: and I’ve been happy.
 
Why I switched...

Got my webcam today. It's a little cheap thing, manufactured somewhere in Asia (Hong Kong, maybe). The name of it (in system listings and such) shows up in weird symbols since I haven't got the appropriate Asian language alphabet installed, whatever it may be.

I also had to fix the thing to my monitor with Blu Tack (you know, that gummy blue stuff you use to hang posters).

However, it does work, and I had a blast today talking for a few hours to someone I haven't seen in a long time, and the little girls were nuts for the thing and were playing peekabo and waving and such. I'm going to try to get a couple of small movies of them (.avi, since that's what the software captures) and put them in their gallery or something. Zoë mugging for the camera was hilarious!

So there you go. A cheap web camera can make many people happy, particularly if they're geeky people.

There is yet ANOTHER new exploit out there that the idiot spammers have figured out to use.

This is pretty obscure and fairly recent. For nine years (since Andrew first wrote that script for me in 1996) that mailform and things based on it (such as the grap